TCEA+Conference

K-2 Can Blog! Can you This handout will be very useful in order to keep my students engaged in what they are writing about on their blogs. The primary reason why I chose this handout was because of the new position I will be in I need to ensure that teachers are using technology appropriately with students. K-2 are required to teach their own computer and it seems to be very unstructured at times. Having a simple guideline and helping them set up their own blog I believe will be very useful. It is important that teacher do not just give the students a blog and say start writing they need to have some guidance and this handout gives teachers an idea of what they can use blogs with.

[|50 Ways to Integrate Technology] This hand out redirects you to a website that contains a variety of websites that a teacher could use in the classroom. Some of the sites that I am impressed with include Dove whisper. This site contains a variety of games that are broken down to specific grade, subject, and content. It does take several clicks to get to where you want to go but it is very nicely organized. The next website [|Powerpoint games] allows the teacher to download templates of a variety of games to be able to play as a review game. This adds a lot of entertainment to the classroom.Another website that I think primary teachers will really enjoy with their students is [|build yourself wild]. This website allows you to create your own avatar and then modify it by adding animal body parts. This would be a great thing for students to use as part of a creative writing assignment. There were a variety of other useful tools to be used that I had heard of such as animoto, wordle, survey monkey, everynote, and dropbox

You can create an Elementary Film Festival This handout really got me excited about next year. I think it is a great idea for our school to have a film festival. Students would be given the opportunity to create their own videos in a variety of categories and then they would be allowed to vote on their favorite. We can extend the voting beyond the classroom by asking people out side of our school/district to watch the videos. Watching some of the videos they showed for examples I noticed a few guidelines should probably be followed in order to ensure safety, primarily the use of the last names. The likelihood of anything to happen is not that high but it is still a good safety precaution to omit information that does not have to be given out. Next year I envision treating this like a major event where students would get dressed up just like the academy awards. I feel they would really benefit from this and it will be interesting to see their creativity.

Jing-ing in the classroom This session intrigues me because I often wonder that if I record parts of my lessons for students to look back at would they become more productive. When it is working our school district is suppose to have a very handy podcast composer that allows the teacher to post directly to the server. For the past few months, however it has not been working for me to experiment with. I did however record instructions on how to make a tri-fold brochure in one of the classes and then showed it to the students. One thing I noticed that it is important to do as you make the videos is the pacing needs to be slow. That is going to be my biggest struggle next year is making sure I go slow enough not to pass up students, especially the lower levels that I will be teaching. It was awkward watching the video and not taking myself, but I see the benefits for this because not only can students go back to a video if they did not understand, but they can pause the video if it goes too fast for them. I have often done this when working with Photoshop and it works outs very nicely.

50+ Ways to Use Your Document Camera So the one new thing each elementary teacher got at the beginning of the year was a document camera. The newest building received the SMART document camera's along with the cubes that can make things look 3-d. Other building recieved P2V cameras. That was literally all teachers received without so much as a hint as to how they can use them in the classroom. This is something worth sharing with other staff members because it give them ideas of how to actually use the document camera in ways they may not have thought of previously. Some of the ideas would not fit very well simply because if the teacher has a copy of what she/he wants to show on the computer it is just as easy to show them the one on the computer, but a few ideas that were useful were: Capturing plant growth with time lapse photos Displaying projects, such as dioramas Share apps on mobile devices, Working with Manipulatives Teaching students how to use a reference book Project a quiz Use it as a scanner. This is perhaps my favorite thing to do because it is much quicker to be able to do.